Copasetic Flow

In her most recent blog post Evelyn Krieger asked if readers were trying new things, and it reminded me, that yeah, the kids and I are in the midst of that! We've taken up an unfamiliar sport—Bay swimming in San Francisco—wrapped in a familiar one from when I wa a kid—competitive lap swimming in a pool. It was one of the kids here, the seven year-old aka Tawnse who got me back into the water. On a trip to a beach at one of our coves, she fell into the water. She did what we’d talked about a dozen or so times before, and she’d practiced once or twice before—she stood back up—and all was well. Right after that though, she declared that she wanted to learn to swim at that beach. And, since we unschool, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing! It’s been kinda cold—the water temperature this month has hovered around 65 degrees —but it’s been a lot of fun! The learning’s been small on some days, and immense on others. In general, everything is moving along rather swimmingly, ( yeah … I wen...

 Read this article by the author of Timeless Learning  a book about changing traditional schools in ways that look remarkably reminiscent of unschooling. The author uses baseball as a metaphor, but... It's all about how we percieve tasks, how we learn, what our expectations might be, and how those expectations might have come to enter our psyches. It's about... well, you'll see.   As an unschooing parent, I frequently don't think about how schools can/should work because the two systems (traditional schooling and unschooling) are portrayed as different, ofthen orthogonal activities. However, two things lay at the base of each of these systems: relationships with kids and learning.  In unschooling there's still material to be presented, even if it's just strewing and/or talking with the kids to mine their own intrests. There are still expectations--even though unschooling tacitly eliminates them--because we're sill human and many of us, including me, grew up ...

Watching the behavior towards COVID and monkeypox of some of the folks that live in my home town of San Francisco, as well as our federally appointed health officials, I’m left swimming in the deep end of the pool searching for explanations. I’d rather come up with a reason that’s compassionate, something that doesn’t make my fellow American a bigotted, uncaring murderer, and frankly, lately, it’s been kind of tough to do that. We lost all our COVID mitigations months ago, masking is gone; indoor everything is back regardless of case counts, hospitalizations, deaths, or any other metric that might be tracked; institutions paid lip service to ventilation, and then mostly did nothing; and finally, they’re playing the AIDs game with Monkepox, asking us to believe that it’s only a problem for men who have sex with other men, never mind that kids and women are catching it as well. With all this input, in trying to come up with a compassionate solution regarding my peers’ complete and utter ...

Telling kids what they ‘can do' is way more freeing than asking them what they’d ‘like to do’. tldr; if you’re not comfortable with the kids in your house running off’t, don’t read this. A few days ago, at home, my partner mentioned to the kids that in 20 minutes or so they should meet up because they needed to go to the market at the bottom of the hill. 40 minutes later, she got a text from them, "Where are you?" "In the house, where are you?" "At the market!" — antigrav_kids (@thord_ee_r) July 22, 2022 Just thought of this: is 'running off’t' a contraction for “running off withouT me/us”? This is a brief, brief post, and frankly maybe I should do more of these, but anyway. We have insanely yummy dumpling bakeries down the hill from us in three directions here in San Francisco. They are firggin’ delightful! They’re locally owned. Some of them only take cash. (Fuck the Man.) And—excuse the religious platitude—God they sell crazy good, ch...

 We got back to transit this week! We were out of town for a month hanging out in Montana. The state’s pretty awesome, but in the small towns we were around, transit wasn’t really a thing, and  we missed it! If nothing else, just getting to zone out while someone else drives is a huge privilege . There’s not much to this post, but transit makes me smile, and I’m smiling again writing about it, so here goes. On Tuesday, I had to turn in our rental car, so I made a quick jaunt to the airport. My mood improved as soon as the car keys were out of my hands. No more worrying about someone else’s incredibly expensive property and the huge load of regulations surrounding all things driving. Even more happily, a leisurely stroll through the airport put me in front of the SFO museum’s (there are several mini-museums in SFO) new exhibit about Victorian wallpaper! All cultured up, I headed for the BART platform. The ride was simplicity itself, dumping me back close enough to the house to ...

What it is A number of campsites sprinkled along Pass Creek as it winds through Blue Jay Canyon paralleled by National Forest Road 122 off of US 93, with an occasional pit toilet restroom. Pass Creek is accessible from each of the campsites. Tall canyon walls shatter the ground, rising above the creek on either side of the road. Last Visited:   June of 2022. Last Reviewed: June of 2022 Getting there: As you travel along US 93, turn north onto National Forest Road 122 aka Pass Creek Rd. Drive about six and a half miles to reach the canyon itself, although you’ll find campsites dispersed along the road beginning as soon as you enter Salmon Challis National Forest . Review: The campsites sit along Pass Creek as it winds through the canyon. One of the campsites we passed was across the road from a pit toilet. The other six or so campsites which were a few tenths of a mile away from each other would require a walk back along the graveled road to reach the facilities, (or you coul...

 We've made a decision lately that we're going to be getting out more. Let me start this by saying however, we will always, always mask: outdoors, indoors, everywhere.  But, getting back to the topic at hand, we're going to be doing more things more often outside the house.  It's become blindingly apparent to me—and maybe it hasn’t to you, and that’s OK, and one of the topics of this post—that the medical influencers and the powers that be are never going to let this pandemic end. Since we’re still going to have to function in the world, we, as a family, made the decision we have to get back into the world. And, it’s going to be quite scary. And, it’s going to be an awful lot of fun getting back into the world. (If we don't enjoy it, why even take the associated risks right?) And this same thing is happening to lot's of people: Yes. It's now an impossible situation. And so lonely. As neither the normies who think Covid is over, nor the hardcore single/child...